What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Quotes

“And I would tell him, so full of twentysomething wisdom, that life is almost never about choosing between one thing you really want and another thing you don't want at all. If you're lucky, and healthy, and live in a country where you have enough to eat and no fear that you're going to get shot when you walk out your door, life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally. And you have to evaluate and determine which awesome thing you want infinitesimally more, and then give up that other awesome thing you want almost exactly as much. You have to trade awesome for awesome. Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a little in mourning for that other thing.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“When you travel, you're forced to have new thoughts. "Is this alley safe?" "Is this the right bus?" "Was this meat ever a house pet?" It doesn't even matter what the new thoughts are, it feels so good to just have some variety. And it's a reboot for your brain. I can feel the neurons making new connections again with new problems to solve, clawing their way back to their nimbler, younger days.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a little in mourning for that other thing.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“To me, marriage was an ending, not a beginning. A stone on my chest. A giving-up, a decision to walk away from an interesting life for one just like everyone else’s. Much more “ever after” than “happily.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“I probably should say that this is what makes you a good traveler in my opinion, but deep down I really think this is just universal, incontrovertible truth. There is the right way to travel, and the wrong way. And if there is one philanthropic deed that can come from this book, maybe it will be that I teach a few more people how to do it right. So, in short, my list of what makes a good traveler, which I recommend you use when interviewing your next potential trip partner: 1. You are open. You say yes to whatever comes your way, whether it’s shots of a putrid-smelling yak-butter tea or an offer for an Albanian toe-licking. (How else are you going to get the volcano dust off?) You say yes because it is the only way to really experience another place, and let it change you. Which, in my opinion, is the mark of a great trip. 2. You venture to the places where the tourists aren’t, in addition to hitting the “must-sees.” If you are exclusively visiting places where busloads of Chinese are following a woman with a flag and a bullhorn, you’re not doing it. 3. You are easygoing about sleeping/eating/comfort issues. You don’t change rooms three times, you’ll take an overnight bus if you must, you can go without meat in India and without vegan soy gluten-free tempeh butter in Bolivia, and you can shut the hell up about it. 4. You are aware of your travel companions, and of not being contrary to their desires/​needs/​schedules more often than necessary. If you find that you want to do things differently than your companions, you happily tell them to go on without you in a way that does not sound like you’re saying, “This is a test.” 5. You can figure it out. How to read a map, how to order when you can’t read the menu, how to find a bathroom, or a train, or a castle. 6. You know what the trip is going to cost, and can afford it. If you can’t afford the trip, you don’t go. Conversely, if your travel companions can’t afford what you can afford, you are willing to slum it in the name of camaraderie. P.S.: Attractive single people almost exclusively stay at dumps. If you’re looking for them, don’t go posh. 7. You are aware of cultural differences, and go out of your way to blend. You don’t wear booty shorts to the Western Wall on Shabbat. You do hike your bathing suit up your booty on the beach in Brazil. Basically, just be aware to show the culturally correct amount of booty. 8. You behave yourself when dealing with local hotel clerks/​train operators/​tour guides etc. Whether it’s for selfish gain, helping the reputation of Americans traveling abroad, or simply the spreading of good vibes, you will make nice even when faced with cultural frustrations and repeated smug “not possible”s. This was an especially important trait for an American traveling during the George W. years, when the world collectively thought we were all either mentally disabled or bent on world destruction. (One anecdote from that dark time: in Greece, I came back to my table at a café to find that Emma had let a nearby [handsome] Greek stranger pick my camera up off our table. He had then stuck it down the front of his pants for a photo. After he snapped it, he handed the camera back to me and said, “Show that to George Bush.” Which was obviously extra funny because of the word bush.) 9. This last rule is the most important to me: you are able to go with the flow in a spontaneous, non-uptight way if you stumble into something amazing that will bump some plan off the day’s schedule. So you missed the freakin’ waterfall—you got invited to a Bahamian family’s post-Christening barbecue where you danced with three generations of locals in a backyard under flower-strewn balconies. You won. Shut the hell up about the waterfall. Sally”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“The deep feeling of oneness you have with someone when you’ve done all of the work on yourself you have to do to make a marriage work doesn’t take away your independence. It frees you to be the person you actually are. It wipes away all that nasty ego stuff, and lets your soul shine through.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“I love that I am but one of millions of single girls hitting the road by themselves these days. A hateful little ex-boyfriend once said that a houseful of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but not it's a house full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures. He said it derogatorily: Look at all of this tragic overcompensating in the form of tribal masks and rain sticks. But I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women's progress as a gender. I'm damn proud of us. Also, since I have both a cat and a lot of foreign souvenirs, I broke up with that dude and went on a really great trip.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“In Judaism, the way you learn to love someone is by giving to them,” she said. “The more you give to a person, the more you end up loving them. If love is just a feeling, and that feeling changes, then what? Love has to be something you choose to build.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“I always say that I need to travel to keep from dying of boredom from my own internal monologue. I think that, generally, most of us have a total of about twenty thoughts. And we just scroll through those thoughts, over and over again, in varying order, all day every day.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“My guidebook told me that the national anthem for Ukraine translated roughly to “We have not yet died!” That was the most victorious and optimistic version they could come up with. When Russians meet, their “Nice to meet you” literally translates to “How many years, how many winters?” Why couldn’t it at least be summers? It’s all very dramatic and dark in Russia.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“I remembered the lesson my mom taught me at age seven in a swimming pool in Hawaii. I was a shy little girl and an only child, so on vacations I was usually playing alone, too afraid to go up to the happy groups of kids and introduce myself. Finally, on one vacation, my mom asked me which I'd rather have: a vacation with no friends, or one scary moment... After that, one scary moment became something I was always willing to have in exchange for the possible payoff. I became a girl who knew how to take a deep breath, suck it up, and walk into any room by herself.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“And then there I was, literally tenderized like pounded meat by my year of work, failure, and physical and emotional battering. My New Zealand beach realization that I was ready for all of the things I had feared I was too broken to ever want felt both good because it meant that I was normal, but also terrifying. I was normal. Years later, Lena Dunham’s character on Girls would have a similar moment when she broke down and wept to a nice, handsome doctor with a beautiful house, “Please don’t tell anyone this, but I want to be happy … I want all the things everyone wants.” I was embarrassed to be a thirty-five-year-old woman who was looking for true love, and a family. It was so freaking typical. But I was also deeply relieved that I’d finally gotten there.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“She told me that since they date exclusively [in Judaism] with the intent to marry, the conversation is very direct right from the start. You’re not sitting quietly next to each other at a movie wondering if you can get over his awful shirt. You’re interviewing. And from your first date, you’re focusing, apparently, on only three questions: Do we want the same things out of life? Do we bring out the best in each other? Do we find each other attractive? That’s it. In that order.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“When you travel you’re forced to have new thoughts. “Is this alley safe?” “Is this the right bus?” “Was this meat ever a house pet?” It doesn’t even matter what the new thoughts are, it feels so good to just have some variety. And it’s a reboot for your brain. I can feel the neurons making new connections again with new problems to solve, clawing their way back to their nimbler, younger days.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“Getting married young is gambling on a game you don’t know how to play. You don’t know who either of you is going to become. If you get married before you are fully cooked, you have no idea if you are marrying someone who will ultimately be compatible with you. 2.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“You can't control everything. Just enjoy what the world is giving you.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“The greatest thing about vacation romances is you don’t have to break up, or say hard things to each other about what you are or aren’t feeling. You don’t have to talk about what isn’t working, or why. You get to just tell yourselves that it would have lasted forever if not for the geography. You don’t have to break up. But”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“Second, that you can have both love and freedom when you fall in love with an exotic local in an exotic locale, since there is a return ticket next to the bed that you by law will eventually have to use.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“They hadn’t had my experience of Argentina. It hadn’t saved them during their times of crisis the way it had saved me. But they hadn’t expected it to; only I had. I realized they didn’t look at travel the way I looked at it, like medicine, like my chance to right all of the wrongs that might exist in my life. They just had a few interesting days in South America, and went home not too disappointed, but not too changed, either.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“I would eventually realize that I didn't want to be with Ferris any more than he wanted to be with me--we were way too much alike. Remember that in the movie, Ferris doesn't date a female Ferris. He dates Solane--the one on the ground looking up at him adoringly as he goes by on the float, wondering, How does he do it? I wasn't that girl. I wanted to be up on the float.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“The experience also illuminated another fact: regardless of how you travel, as you get deeper into your thirties you might be the only person your age out on the road at all, whether it's in the hostels with the twentysomethings, or on the fancy cruises with the sixtysomethings. In your fourth decade, your compatriots are mostly at home, working, raising humans, getting husbands through rehab, living for someone besides themselves.

Suckers.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“There are moments in one’s life that make one realize one could be making better choices.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“A home run is when you’ve stopped having sex altogether and start a book club.)”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“One of my dad’s best pieces of parenting advice had been very simple: wait. He didn’t tell me to abstain from sex and drugs forever, which I’m sure would have made me try everything immediately. He just told me to take a beat, watch my friends try things out, learn what to do and what not to do based on their mistakes and triumphs, and then try out what I was going to try. Without consciously deciding to, I took that advice to heart in many elements of my life: just wait. With marriage and children, but also with drugs and men.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“Finally, on one vacation, my mom asked me which I’d rather have: a vacation with no friends, or one scary moment.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“When you travel you’re forced to have new thoughts. “Is this alley safe?” “Is this the right bus?” “Was this meat ever a house pet?” It doesn’t even matter what the new thoughts are, it feels so good to just have some variety. And it’s a reboot for your brain. I can feel the neurons making new connections again with new problems to solve, clawing their way back to their nimbler, younger days. Even the process of learning about Israel, let alone my day in Jerusalem, woke up my thought patterns again better than anywhere I’ve ever been.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“I’m not looking for a particular person, I’m looking for a particular feeling. I wanted”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“...давайте будем честны - если ты никогда не теряешь себя, значит, ты не играешь в полную силу.”
― Кристин Ньюман, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

“security. When you fly to Israel with El Al, there is a multi-tiered, one-on-one interview process where you are given a security rating, from one to seven. A one is for a Jewish Israeli, and gets the fewest security delays. A seven is for a probable terrorist. It turns out that single Western women “of a certain age” are much closer to a seven than a one. Apparently there have been incidents where sad, middle-aged single girls get involved in online relationships with “handsome Israelis” who then invite these lonely hearts to come visit them in Israel. “Just pick up a package and bring it for me, and then our hearts will be forever joined Old Testament–style,” these men promise. Then the sad, lonely girl picks up the package, having no idea that her “boyfriend” is actually an Arab terrorist, and unknowingly tries to bring her lover’s bomb on a plane.”
― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding